CA-tool Dev & Maintenance - AIM

[IMPACT]

The Community Advisors as a part of their process have been using the CA-tool to undertake assessments for a number of funds. It is a useful and valuable addition to the CA process and used by a majority of the CA body and it helps to better distribute the workload of CAs among all the proposals.

The tool offers CAs a place to discover proposals, record assessments, engage with low assessed proposals (and the mechanism to achieve this), and manage participation.

Without it the CA process would return to spreadsheets and the basic features currently provided by Ideascale.

For fund 8 the CA tool will include additional level of filtering, including the tags currently provided by proposers in the new submission form: this concept will be extended in next funds introducing a basic skill profiling for the CA (always saved locally in the browser to avoid identity disclosure) in order to suggest proposals based also on expertise in combination with the other data points already in use.

Tech specs

The CA-tool is a SPA (Single Page Application) developed in Vue.js 2 that uses Buefy as a UI components library.

All static fund data are integrated directly in the tool and additional interactive data (like the number of assessments per proposal) are fetched from an external API updated by IOG. The tool uses localStorage to store each CA data locally, providing a mechanism to export / import previous generated assessments.

For the next funds we plan to update the current version to Vue.js 3, implying the identification of a new UI library (Buefy is not compatible with Vue.js 2) and the integration of it in the tool. 

Open source

From the beginning of the creation of the Community Tools we always tried to encourage others to create their own version of the tools, because we believe that diversity in the ecosystem strengthens decentralization and the resilience of the system.

For this reason Community Tools are Open Source from Day 1 and so they will remain forever.

This proposal will allow us to maintain existing features and digest Fund data to undertake operations for Fund 9 and Fund 10, and eventually adapt it in case of major changes in the Catalyst process.

Continuing to maintain the iterative approach followed since the first introduction of the tool to the community, the proposal will also allow us to add additional features requested by the community and identified by us.

This proposal will add to the Challenge KPI of 'Number of maintenance proposals and groups created' in that it is a maintenance proposal.

Given that the project is already successfully in operation and maintained for several funds, there are always risks about people’s involved in the active development, who could encounter blockers of any type that will prevent them from working and delivery.

For this reason, AIM has already on boarded two additional devs who will be responsible of the maintenance and the development of the tool. We have engaged two quality devs in order to have a backup in case of any problems.

[FEASIBILITY]

This proposal will cover the next two funds, being Fund 9 and 10. The milestones would be to have the proposal data successfully digested and the app prepared for operation in time for the CA stage of these two funds.

• Planning of development, new features, community feedback incorporation - delivery Fund 9 / week 2
• Challenges data update - delivery Fund 9 / week 2
• Assessments criteria data update - delivery Fund 9 / week 2
• Example assessments data update - delivery Fund 9 / week 2
• Guiding questions and resources update - delivery Fund 9 / week 2
• New features development - delivery Fund 9 / week 3
• Update to Vue.js 3 - tentative delivery Fund 9 / week 3 - could be postponed to Fund 10
• New features QA and testing - delivery Fund 9 / week 4
• Proposals data update - delivery Fund 9 / start of week 5
• Tool release - delivery Fund 9 / start of week 5

• Planning of development, new features, community feedback incorporation - delivery Fund 10 / week 2
• Challenges data update - delivery Fund 10 / week 2
• Assessments criteria data update - delivery Fund 10 / week 2
• Example assessments data update - delivery Fund 10 / week 2
• Guiding questions and resources update - delivery Fund 10 / week 2
• New features development - delivery Fund 10 / week 3
• New features QA and testing - delivery Fund 9 / week 4
• Proposals data update - delivery Fund 10 / start of week 5
• Tool release - delivery Fund 9 / start of week 5

Development costs: $3600

These costs will go to the developer to maintain and develop the tool.

Management: $1000

This is the oversight, planning and code reviews of the development of the tool.

Administration: $1200

This budget will cover the participation costs of catalyst funding inclusion reporting, meetings, payments and general community participation including presentations and promotion.

Testing and QA: $700

Each fund requires a testing round of the tool and data integrity.

AIM Development: $1000

The Cardano AIM (Assembly of Inspired Masses) is a community guild of builders, creators and doers. Our goal is to develop community tools that progress the Catalyst Experiment and add value to the Cardano ecosystem. The Cardano Development fund is an addition to AIM proposals and is designed to assist with the development and management of the Cardano AIM guild. 

Often in the past, we worked in advance on new tools or features and then made requests for funding in a retroactive way. We have now on-boarded new developers to work with AIM, the costs associated with this and other possible risks are now in play. We’ll therefore use these funds as an experiment in generating a specific side treasury operated and managed by AIM to, over time go towards the future development of AIM projects on Cardano work towards sustainability.

Total: 7500

Lucio Baglione: Technical Lead - Developer with 9+ years of experience (mainly focused on web/mobile. Languages and frameworks: PHP, Javascript, Typescript, Python, Ruby - Laravel, Ruby on Rails, Wordpress, Angular.js, Vue.js, Node.js). CA and vCA, co-creator of the Community Tools (Proposer/CA/vCA/Voter Tools) https://github.com/Project-Catalyst/ https://github.com/coire1 .

Victor Corcino: Promotion and marketing - Veteran Community Advisor (vCA), Proposal Mentor, CAs' elected representative for the 1st Catalyst Circle, co-creator of the Community Tools (Proposer/CA/vCA/Voter Tools), Catalyst Swarm core member, engineering/science/developer and 'hands-on' teaching background.

Phil Khoo: Project Lead - Veteran Community Advisor (vCA), co-creator of the Community Tools (Proposer/CA/vCA/Voter Tools and Community Landing page), front end UI/UX designer and finance and business background.

Juliana & Plamen - The AIM Developer team.

[AUDITABILITY]

• Number of Github commits
• Number of Github issues opened/resolved
• Number of Github PR reviewed / merged / accepted
• Number of feedback received and implemented

The success for this proposal will be achieved in the delivery of two major updates prior to Assessment Stage of Fund 9 and Fund 10, to allow CAs to use it in the upcoming Assessment stage.

From fund9 we’ll anonymously track users that will use the tool, in order to have some hard metrics to measure the current adoption of the tool.

This is not a direct continuation of a funded project but it is a spin off proposal from this fund 5 one: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/350981